Flabio Offers Women Bigger, Broader Option

December 27, 1994|Los Angeles Times

The casting call went something like this:

"Wanted. Male Caucasian. One hundred to 200 pounds overweight. Must be willing to wear a Speedo in the surf."

After going through 75 portfolios, they found their man: 38-year-old Michael Glover of Redondo Beach, Calif. He measures 6-foot-6, 400 pounds, has deep blue eyes and apparently looks good in a Speedo bikini. Of course, when Glover arrived in Santa Barbara, Calif., in January so they could photograph him wearing skivvies in mid-50-degree weather, he thought the whole gig was a bit strange. After all, here he was, a former truck driver with a 58-inch waist. And all of a sudden he's got a photographer telling him to flirt with the camera?

"They give me $150 an hour, tell me to strip down to my `chones,' and take pictures of me," Glover says. "They didn't tell me what it was about."

Looking back, Glover knows it was a historic day: It was the making of Flabio.

Flabio was the brainchild of Eric States, a 34-year-old Santa Barbara resident who owns a kayak accessories company. It was the fall of '93: "I have a little bit of a gut," he says. "One day I walked out of the shower, and I said to my wife, `What do you think, honey - Fabio? Nah ... Flabio!'''

Flabio, he thought, would be the perfect, cuddly counterpart to the buff bod of cover-stud Fabio. After an unsuccessful try at making a Flabio doll, States decided an easy way to market his idea would be with a poster.

Soon, States says, he faced a bidding war for the rights to distribute the official Flabio poster. It features Glover in a beach-bathing pose borrowed from the pages of Fabio's own popular chest-exposing calendar.

For his part, Glover is pretty good-humored about the whole thing. During the last year, he has been featured in People, on CNN and on Jerry Springer's syndicated TV talk show.

Of course, the parody has yet to make him rich. While Fabio's been known to drive a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Porsche and Jaguar, Glover drives a Chevy Astro van. And while Fabio is known to spend time in Manhattan and the Hollywood Hills, Glover lives in his mother-in-law's Redondo Beach house.

He'll take his new persona as far as it can go, he says, "as long as they don't ask me to go bare naked.